stomping ground: n. (usu. in pl.) a favourite or familiar haunt or place of action.
breeding ground: n. 1 an area of land where an animal, esp. a bird, habitually breeds. 2. a thing that favours the development or occurrence of something, esp. something unpleasant.
(OCD)

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Thursday, 21 February 2013

In talking with a friend of mine who
identifies as Marxist, I realized that my position on communism is
fairly muddled. While I generally consider myself a socialist rather
than a communist, I realized that I had no particular reason to
choose socialism over communism besides complacency. Part of my
preference for socialism is probably quite unlike most
people's criticisms of communism: I grudgingly endorse strong state control
as a means of enforcing environmental and anti-discrimination
initiatives (largely because I'm cynical about the efficacy of
grassroots activism to make any difference), and socialism requires a
centralized state in ways that communism does not (or, at least, I
tend to associate socialism with a centralized state and communism
with communes and collectives). However, I do not think that that
really explains why I dislike communism.

The real reason I dislike communism is
that I find it ugly.

For me, the communist aesthetic is
founded entirely in the realm of labour. Of course this makes sense,
since communist thought has historically been a critique of
capitalism and the particular labour relations within capitalist
economics. It is perfectly logical that communism would return
repeatedly to labour, and given Marx's historical position, that
labour tends to be imagined as industrial. The images of communism
are of factory-work and by extension of automation. At times, the
images might be agricultural, but they are not particularly pastoral.
Thanks perhaps to Soviet Russian propaganda but almost certainly to
the reality of farm work as well, agricultural work in communist
aesthetics appears mechanized and labour-intensive. Not only is none
of this pretty, it is also undesirable. In truth, I dislike both the idea of difficult manual labour and the idea of work in a factory setting. (As Northrop Frye explicitly
puts it, the world of labour is not the worst of all worlds, but it
is closer to the world we reject than the world we desire. I don't
think I need to lean on Frye for such a claim, though. Among other
things, I am only making claims about my imagining
of these economic systems; I am not making claims about a universal
imagination.)

Of course it is the case that
unpleasant working conditions are even
more characteristic of capitalism than of communism; uncovering that
fact is one of communism's chief critiques. But because communism
makes the reality of hard work, industrialization, and mechanization
apparent, it is communism that I associate with those realities.
Capitalism, meanwhile, promotes an appealing fiction as its
aesthetic, one of hygienic consumption, choice, and leisure. Of
course, all of these are fictions: we work more, destroy more, have
fewer meaningful options under capitalism. However, capitalism
appears pleasant, especially to those of us in the middle class.

Let's
look at that word “pleasant,” because it's also important. The
primary emotions promoted by capitalism (or, I should say, capitalist
advertising, because I'm reifying capitalism and I shouldn't do that)
is pleasure, satisfaction, and admiration. The emotions that I
associate with communism are much different. In fact, I don't
associate many emotions at all with communism, since I think of it as
largely dehumanized and mechanized. But when I think of communism I
also think of revolution, and I associate revolution with anger or
some similar passion. And I also think of union meetings, and I
associate union meetings with frustration and discomfort.

Of
course I know that advertising is a lie and I am at times able to
return to capitalism the aesthetics of labour, alienation, struggle, anger, and destruction, but it is ordinarily
free-market capitalism that I think of in those senses. Socialism, or
the kind of socialism practised in Canada, at any rate, is really
capitalism with sort-of-communist aspirations, and it ought to be
subject to many of the same critiques as free-market capitalism. However, since socialism is
certainly less subject
to some of those critiques, I associate socialism with other, more
attractive aesthetics: trees and clean water (ie. environmentalism),
the redemption of criminals (ie. rehabilitative programs), the rescue
of the downtrodden (ie. welfare, public health care), the inculcation
of culture (ie. public education), the connections that connect and
thereby produce a nation (ie. postal system, roads). Socialism
obviously looks better than capitalism (as it should!), but somehow
it manages to dodge the trap that caught communism by not directly critiquing
capitalism itself, instead appearing as an improved form
of capitalism.

A political position's aesthetics is a very silly basis on which to judge it, but I think I'm
right in attributing my preference to aesthetics, and I suspect I'm
not the only one to do so. The problem isn't just understanding that
advertisers, and others invested in a capitalist economy, have
produced an aesthetic of capitalism that is fictitious. The problem is with the aesthetics I associate with communism: perhaps communism needs a better PR job, but perhaps it is also true that I need to re-think my own conception of communism's aesthetics.

I am not stating that I now am a
communist; rather, I am noting that in order to think through
economic systems I need to first address how concerns about
aesthetics are impeding the clarity of my thought. It also occurs to
me that in other countries, or even other parts of this country, or
even other demographics in this part of Canada, such aesthetics might
differ.

Welcome to the Thinking Grounds!

Note: This blog is now retired. I no longer stand behind everything I have written here; while I have indicated reversals of opinion in many places, I am sure there are posts I have forgotten about. Please feel free to follow me at my new blog.

This is a place where I think out loud about questions that are troubling me. You can find out more about me in the About page. My interests are eclectic, but I often frame things in terms I'm familiar with from my time studying English literature.

--Christian H

About Me

I used to study English Literature as a graduate student in a major British Columbian university. I now study Library and Information Science. Sometime in there I also worked in a museum in northern Alberta.
I am Canadian.